When the ancient Polynesians invented surfing, they often used a paddle to help them navigate. Fast-forward a few millennia, and Stand-Up Paddleboarding, or SUP, finds itself trendy again. Part of its increasing popularity is that standing upright allows surfers to spot waves more easily and thus catch more of them, multiplying the fun factor. Paddling back to the wave becomes less of a strain as well. The ability to cruise along on flat inland water, surveying the sights, is another advantage. Finally, its a good core workout. If youre sold on the idea, schedule an intro SUP lesson, free with board and paddle rental, and you may find yourself riding the waves like a Polynesian king.More

Many of us remember coming home from our elementary schools with freshly glazed pinchpots, cups, or whatever else our young imaginations could conjure up. Saturday mornings at the Randall Museum can bring that memory back, or create a new one for the youngsters. Ceramics make great gifts — especially on Mothers' and Fathers' Day. Hop on board for the Randall's once-weekly class, and for $6 and two weeks to have your work fired and glazed, you'll have all the materials you need.More

Share

Latest in Best Of

An inconspicuous doorway off Valencia Street leads to a treasure trove of zines and 10,000-plus hours of sound and video recordings from the 1960s to the 1990s, all charting the progressive history of the Bay and its effect on global radical movements.

The Possessed: Academia hasn't killed Elif Batuman's sense of humor

The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

by Elif BatumanFarrar, Straus and Giroux 304 pages, $15

The title of Elif Batuman's highly charming new book, she writes, is "borrowed from Dostoyevsky's weirdest novel, The Demons, formerly translated as The Possessed, which narrates the descent into madness of a circle of intellectuals in a remote Russian province: a situation analogous, in certain ways, to my own experiences in grad school."

Batuman, who is of Turkish ancestry and grew up in New Jersey, now lives in San Francisco and teaches at Stanford, the documented home base for her Dostoyevskian descent. You may not consider comp-lit conferences inherently adventurous, but if anybody's bildungsroman can persuade you otherwise, it's hers.

Almost certainly too funny and easy-going to satisfy serious literary scholars, yet mercifully less ingratiating than its Roz Chast cartoon cover illustration might suggest, Batuman's book is a rare gem: a genuine affirmation of deep reading — of caring about ideas and about being carried off by them — from an exceptional writer who's not yet even 35.

Years ago, as a budding literary aspirant, Batuman uneasily opted out of the workshop-intensive assembly line of contemporary American fiction, in which "middle-class women keep struggling with kleptomania, deviant siblings keep going in and out of institutions, people continue to be upset by power outages and natural disasters, and rueful writerly types go on hesitating about things." But she wasn't so keen on the ivory-tower echo chamber, either. So what was an eager young bookworm to do?

It is not so unreasonable to search for answers to big questions in the provenance of Babel, Chekhov, Pushkin, and Tolstoy. Given her high tolerance for mystification and contradiction, it seems only natural that Batuman's attention eventually would turn to Russia, that endless source not just for great writers of dense tomes but also for even denser political provisions by which to repress them. She figured she should go look around there, and eventually did. There were detours.

She began by doing budget travel in Turkey for a Let's Go guide, "with its specious left-wing rhetoric, as if it were a form of 'sticking it to the man' to reject a chain motel in favor of a cold-water pension completely filled with owls." Soon she'd worked her way up to Harper's and The New Yorker, playing editors and academic grantors off each other to fund a murder investigation of Tolstoy's death, or a rumination on the semilegendary 1740 St. Petersburg ice palace and visit to the tourist-baiting 2006 re-creation thereof. Along the way, she found herself subsisting on "cold Ukrainian meat jelly," studying an antique language with a hundred words for "crying" in Uzbekistan, and rather portentously losing her luggage: "When we find the suitcase, we will send it to you," she was told. "In the meantime, are you familiar with our Russian phrase resignation of the soul?"

You might say Batuman has followed in the footsteps of fellow Stanford lit prof and San Francisco resident Terry Castle, who brought out her own eruditely hilarious autobiographical essay collection, The Professor and Other Writings, just last month. But whereas Castle, who is in her 50s, has earned an excellent academic reputation and a readership through seven other books, Batuman has the advantage of a relatively blank slate. We greet her at the beginning of a great career.

"I stopped believing that 'theory' had the power to ruin literature for anyone, or that it was possible to compromise something you loved by studying it," she writes. "Was love really such a tenuous thing? Wasn't the point of love that it made you want to learn more, to immerse yourself, to become possessed?"

Slideshows

Sub Pop recording artists 'clipping.' brought their brand of noise-driven experimental hip hop to the closing night of 2016's San Francisco Electronic Music Fest this past Sunday. The packed Brava Theater hosted an initially seated crowd that ended the night jumping and dancing against the front of the stage. The trio performed a set focused on their recently released Sci-Fi Horror concept album, 'Splendor & Misery', then delved into their dancier and more aggressive back catalogue, and recent single 'Wriggle'.
Opening performances included local experimental electronic duo 'Tujurikkuja' and computer music artist 'Madalyn Merkey.'"